1.1   Design features of language语言的本质特征

Language of human vs. animal language

“No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest.” By Bertrand Russell.

1.1.1          Arbitrariness 任意性

l         Arbitrary relationship between the sound of a morpheme and its meaning. 语素的音和义之间的任意性。

Saussure first pointed out

It refers to that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning.

/buk/, shu, /buh/.

Onomatopoeia/.TnYu.mætYu'piY/ 拟声词 sound like the sounds they describe.

English: dogs bark wow wow

Chinese: wangwangwang

Misunderstanding about the onomatopoeic effect.

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

If you read it aloud, you may feel the connection between the sounds and the meaning. But in fact, you have the feeling because you know the meaning of the words murmurous, flies, and summer eves.

“It is only when you know the meaning that you infer that the form is appropriate.”

So we could say here, arbitrary and onomatopoeic work together.

l         Arbitrariness at the syntactic level 句法上的任意性

Different languages have different way to construct the words into a sentence (syntax).

Questions

Chinese: 你住在北京吗？

English: Do you live in Beijing?

Deutsch: Wohnst du in Beijing? Ich wohne in Beijing.

But in many languages there are similar points in the level of syntax. The order of elements in a sentence follows certain rules, and there is a certain degree of correspondence between the sequence of clauses and the real happenings. 句子的序列和真实发生的事物之间有一定的对应关系。事情发生的顺序=单词的排列顺序？

He came in and sat down.  (the sequence of actions: came in first and then sat down)

He sat down and came in. (the opposite sequence: sat down into his wheelchair first and then came in)

He sat down after he came in. (with the help of after, we can reverse the order of the clauses.)

So, according to systemic-functionalists and American functionalists, language is not arbitrary at the syntactic level. 系统功能/美国功能语言学家

The functionalists hold that the most strictly arbitrary level of language exists in the distinctive units of sounds by which we distinguish pairs of words like pin and bin, or fish and dish.

l         Arbitrariness and convention任意性和约定性

When we know the arbitrariness of the language, the question will follow. How we can connect the form and the meaning of the morpheme语素? What is the link between a linguistic sign and its meaning? This is the convention of language, the rules of the language.

Arbitrariness makes language potentially creative

Conventionality makes learning a language laborious. (because we have so many things to remember)

The invention of Chinese is arbitrary. For example, 我喜欢草原。I like grassland.

The sound of the character is arbitrary. The character is arbitrary. But we have to remember everything if we want to use it.

For learners of a foreign language, it is the conventionality of a language that is more worth noticing than its arbitrariness.

1.1.2          Duality/double articulation 二重性/结构双层性

Duality or double articulation means that the organization of human language has two levels or layers. The sound units or phonemes at the underlying layer always combine into the primary layer of larger meaningful units, such as morphemes, words and sentences.

All communication systems have primary units but these units are not necessarily made up of some underling elements as they are in human language. In other words, the signal may not be cut up into units that may combine together in some other ways to indicate other meanings. For example, the word god is produced by uttering three phonemes at the underlying layer and we can also produce another word dog at the primary layer by uttering exactly the same three phonemes and combining them in a different way.

Sounds: secondary units/ meaningless:

Words: primary units/have distinct and identifiable meaning

/p r ai m e r i/ here are the meaningless sounds

Primary is a word with meaning.

This is the two levels/layers of the language; we call it duality or double articulation.

To talk about duality we must notice that language is hierarchical. 等级性

Language/ continuous stream/

But no language is truly continuous.

To convey discrete meanings there have to be discrete units. 为了传达离散的意义必须有离散的单位.

The lowest level consists of dozens of bits of meaningless sounds which occur in chumps that we call syllables.

Scores of syllables become the carriers of hundreds of meaningful segments of words that are called morphemes, like prefix trans-.

With thousands of words we associate millions of meanings, and on top of these millions---astronomical number of possible sentences and discourses.

This property enables human beings to produce a very large number of sound combinations distinct in meaning with only a limited set of distinct sounds.

Saying: there are only 20-80 phonemes used in the language of human being, but with these limited phonemes, we could combine unlimited words, phrases and sentences.

1.1.3          Creativity创造性

Before we talk about the creativity of language, we could have a brief knowing of generative grammar 生成语法by Chomsky.

In the days before generative grammar, linguists tried to collect as many language corpuses as possible in order to exploring the principle of language. They had found some rules and some exceptions as well.

Chomsky thinks that language can be creative unlimitedly with limited forms. For those linguists who are collecting language corpuses there is no ending to find everything.

Another one, for English learners, we never acquire everything of English by ourselves, but to acquire an ability to use English, to produce utterances with the principle of English.

l         By creativity we mean language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursive-ness (recursive rule递归规则 is a rule which can be applied repeatedly without any definite limit. For example, a recursive rule for the addition of relative clauses could produce

The man saw the dog which bit the girl who was stroking the cat which had caught the mouse which had eaten the cheese which…).

One of the reasons why language is actually a far more complicated entity than traffic lights is that we can use it to create new meanings. There are numerous examples to illustrate that words can be used in new ways to mean new things, and can be instantly understood by people who have never come across that word before.

E g. 同志，小姐，粉丝，知青，愤青，机顶盒，U盘

The creativity of language partly originates from its duality which we just discussed in the above section, namely, because of duality the speaker is able to combine the basic linguistic units to form an infinite set of sentences, most of which are never before produced or heard.

由于语言的二重性，说话者能够结合各个语言单位形成无尽的句子，很多句子从前没有听过。

美眉，

Language is creative in another sense, that is, its potential to create endless sentences. The recursive 第归性nature of language provides a theoretical basis for this possibility.

He bought a book which was written by a teacher who taught in a school which was known for its graduates who…

1.1.4          Displacement移位性

Compare the following

l         A warning cry of a bird instantly announces danger.

l         A dog cannot tell people that its master will be home in a few days.

l         The honeybee’s dance, exhibits displacement a little bit: he can refer to a source of food, which is remote in time and space when he reports on it.

l         We can refer to Confucius, or the North Pole, even though the first has been dead for over 2500 years and the second is situated far away from us.

Animals are under immediate stimulus control.直接刺激控制

Human language is, unlike animal communication systems, stimulus free. What we are talking about need not be triggered by any external stimulus in the world or any internal state.(we could know the meaning when we see the word cold without being in the real situation of that)  Our language enables us to communicate about things that don’t exist or don’t yet exist.

Displacement means that human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present (in time and space) at the moment of communication.